


the truth is stranger than all my dreams

by theragingstorm



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Backstory, Family Dynamics, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Platonic Relationships, and you should know him when you see him, but one does, most of the actual vampires don't explicitly show up here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27218542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theragingstorm/pseuds/theragingstorm
Summary: It was three weeks after Barbara’s eighth birthday when her father took her on her first hunting trip.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon & Jim Gordon
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	the truth is stranger than all my dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rockygetsrolling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockygetsrolling/gifts).



> Happy early Halloween! My gift to you: another fic, and the beginnings of another vampire/werewolf au. 
> 
> Title from Lord Huron's "Meet Me In The Woods."
> 
> (Slight extra warnings for body horror, which I suppose is kind of a given with werewolf stories, and a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to past child abuse.)

It was three weeks after Barbara’s eighth birthday when her father took her on her first hunting trip. 

Her brother was still too young to go, to his great chagrin, for he already loved to kill small animals, and he eyed the duffel bags that Jim was packing with hungry jealousy. At the same time, her mother fluttered around them, eyes sunken, expression sour. She had sworn the children to secrecy, terrified that news of their abnormality might leak out somehow. 

Even at eight, Barbara largely found this silly. Firstly, why would she tell anyone? It was wonderful to have such a secret, to hold tight between her teeth, to taste instead of let spill. Secondly, no one would believe her, even if she did tell; her existence was a scary story to frighten other kids with.

But it did frighten. And she did not miss the way her mother’s eyes flickered while looking at her or at Jim, sometimes. The omnipresent nervousness that lingered in her face, how her shoulders stiffened in fear at even the slightest strange reaction to her children, when dogs on the street panicked and barked, when cats hissed suspiciously, when class hamsters squealed and darted away in terror. 

“They must smell off to the animals, or something,” one of their neighbors bemusedly remarked once. Their mother had laughed far too loudly and shrilly in response. 

But Jim was calm, content even, as he pushed the bags into the back of his car. The full moon was due to rise that night, and the daytime wind already blew cold, ruffling her father’s red-and-silver hair. Barbara sat on the steps with her backpack in hand and her round glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose, eating her way through a packet of Red Vines, something like nerves bubbling up in her stomach. 

“Camping trip?” the man next door called to Jim, beer in hand. His wife’s Pomeranian trotted over to the picket fence, saw Barbara, and instantly dissolved into hysterical yaps. “Oh, shut up, you stupid puffball. Don’t’cha think it’s a bad time for that, Jim?”

“Why so?” Jim picked up Barbara’s backpack for her, then shut the door to the trunk. She stuffed the last of the Red Vines into her mouth just as the Pomeranian ran in circles away from them, howling. 

“The moon tonight. And right before Halloween, too. You’d best watch out for your little girl, all the weirdos will be out.”

Barbara thought of  _ The Craft _ , which she had watched, far too young and against her mother’s wishes. 

_ We  _ are _ the weirdos, mister. _

Jim just smiled faintly, his mustache twitching. 

“I’m not worried about that, Craig. Just want to spend some time with her on her long weekend.”

Barbara smiled on cue, accordingly. 

The neighbor glanced down at her, then paled ever so slightly. He took a step back.

“Um, okay. But you might want to take her to the dentist next, Jim.”

“Why so?”

“Oh, there’s...something wrong with her…” He lifted his upper lip, indicating his flattish canine teeth, considerably blunter than her own. “They’re kinda sharp looking.”

Father and daughter exchanged a look. Barbara bit her lip. 

Carried on the cold wind was a crisp, sharp scent, like the brittle edges of the dying leaves. They scattered the trees and the ground, as yellow and red as dry spices. The grass was turning to brown dust, the wind blew just a little bit colder. Her father flashed a single secretive smile at her, and the corner of her mouth twitched, with only the slightest hint of nerves in it. 

“Family trait,” Jim quipped. 

Barbara zipped up her red hoodie and clambered into the car. 

* * *

The drive out of the city was slow at first, creeping like molasses through the rows of downtown traffic, but once they got onto the New Jersey turnpike, leading out into the countryside, Jim opened up the throttle. With the window halfway down, the wind whistling alongside her, Barbara wondered if that was part of what it was like to fly. 

Her father’s staticky radio played his favorite stations, rumbling their way through classic country, folk, and rock songs, and she leaned against the headrest, gazing out at the golden-brown fields that stretched out beyond the highway.

“You nervous, honey?” 

She bit her lip again. Her canine tooth, sharp as a little white needle, produced a drop of rust-scented blood. 

“No,” she lied.

But Jim’s big, rough hand came down off the steering wheel to engulf her own; she started.

“It’s alright if you are. God knows  _ I _ was, when my father first took me out.”

“Yeah, but you had good reason to be.”

Her dad never liked to go into details about her grandpa. But she saw the way he averted his gaze, the way his strong hands shook whenever the subject came up. She saw how, when she said this, his expression darkened, and she knew that she had struck upon the truth. 

“That’s beside the point,” he said, clearing his throat. “What I mean is, Babs, it’s very overwhelming at first, for most people this happens to.”

“Well  _ duh _ ,” she returned. “But we’re not most people, are we Dad?”

Jim stared at her for a moment. Then he burst out laughing, ruffling her hair, making her whine in protest, ducking and trying in vain to swat him away. 

“ _ You _ certainly aren’t, kiddo.”

Barbara smiled genuinely as he kept laughing. But when he finished, the corners of her mouth fell again. She leaned back again, turning her gaze back out the window. 

“Is that why Mom doesn’t like us?”

“What are you talking about, your mother doesn’t --”

She turned and looked at him pointedly.

He sighed. 

“It’s not that she doesn’t like us, honey, she just...she’s a little scared, that’s all. Scared of what we are.”

She picked at a callous on her hand with a too-sharp nail. 

“Oh.”

“Look, I can’t really blame her for being afraid of  _ me _ , but there’s nothing wrong with  _ you, _ Babs, okay?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” She hated how plaintive her voice sounded. “You and I are the same. If there’s something wrong with you, then there’s gotta be something wrong with me and James too. ‘Cause we’re  _ all _ \--”

Something flickered in her father’s dark eyes, something like a realization. He cleared his throat sharply, cutting her off. 

“Okay, you’re right. You’re right. There’s nothing to be afraid of from any of us.”

She thought of her brother, James, of his love for pulling apart birds and insects and mice, of his bloodied hands with the tiny sharp nails. She thought of the way her own eyes sometimes glowed yellow in the mirror, her mother cringing away from the glass, dropping the brush she’d been untangling her daughter’s hair with. 

She wasn’t so sure her father was telling the truth. That there wasn’t something strange and unusual about what they were, about the experiences they may or may not have shared. 

Barbara licked her split lip, and tasted the blood in her mouth. 

Scaring people was something that the crime lords she’d seen in the newspapers did, that many of the other cops her dad worked with did, the people that she heard him swearing about under his breath when she wasn’t meant to hear. Being the monster that lurked under people’s beds had always made someone the villain in a story. 

But maybe that wasn’t the full picture, was what occurred to her all of a sudden. Maybe her mother was wrong. For her father, along with that mysterious group of vigilantes she had heard about on the news,  _ caught _ villains, after all. He used their fear of him, of the law, even without their knowledge of what he really was, to make sure they wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Maybe being frightening wasn’t such a bad thing, after all, if you embraced it and could use it right. 

One of her fingers went up to trace the sharp, slightly reddened tooth. 

“I’m really looking forward to this weekend, Daddy,” she said at last, a non sequitur that made her father look at her in surprise. 

“I’m glad to hear it, sweetheart.”

A moment passed in gentle quiet, the only sound being the song -- Creedence Clearwater Revival’s  _ ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ _ which made them both smile -- rising from the speakers -- and the rush of the wind outside.

* * *

They arrived at the cabin, perched at the edge of a forest -- hardly the deep, impenetrable woods of fairy tales, this was New Jersey after all, but still dark with trees, scattered with jaundice-yellow leaves, looming tall above her small stature -- and Jim picked her up with ease, carrying her on his back inside. The front of her hoodie and overalls rumpled slightly against the back of her father’s army jacket; they stepped through the door, bags in his hand, a little before dinnertime. After unpacking their clothes and toothbrushes, they ate the tuna salad sandwiches he’d packed, with the little bursts of capers and pickles in amongst the tuna, all but spilling out from between the sourdough slices. Barbara licked the mayonnaise off her hands when she was done. Her father drank a little beer, perhaps to steady his shaking hands, and she, in turn, downed her juice box far too quickly. 

She glanced out the slightly-cracked window as he set down his case files, poring over them, trying to focus on something. She took a deep breath and imitated him, withdrawing the book she’d been reading from her backpack, scooching in to sit under the window, bathed in cloudy light. The nails on her small hand scratched faintly against the paper. 

It was only when that light began to dim that her father pushed his police work aside, getting to his feet. He cleared his throat and took off his glasses, then walked over to remove hers too.

“C’mon, kiddo.”

She thought herself too old to be picked up so frequently, so she tried not to cling to her father as he headed outside, locking the cabin door behind him. 

Barbara had gone through all the mythology and folklore books in the Gotham Public Library that she was, again, supposedly too young for, that her teachers chastised her for reading in class; even while her heart raced, she thought she knew what to expect as Jim took her to the edge of the forest. She took a breath as the sun dipped low and the sky was washed in great brushstrokes of blood-red above the sparse trees. Her father’s arms were tight around her as the red sunlight dimmed to blue twilight, and it was with difficulty that he set her back down on the brown grass. She fiddled with the strings on her hoodie, pulling the flap of red fabric up over her head, and let her mind race. 

She had been too young to shift when each of her birth parents died. Jim had still been her uncle, not her father yet, when she found out what he, his brother, their father, and by extension  _ she _ , all were. She would not be able to control it much until she was older, and moreover, this was the first time she was able to do it at all. 

_ “ How do I know when it’s time?” she had asked Jim, some months prior. He’d regarded her for a moment. _

_ “You’ll know,” he’d told her. “You’ll feel a pull. A compulsion, of sorts. It’s impossible to mistake for anything else.” _

He’d been annoyingly vague, but ultimately right. The last few weeks, ticking their way around the lunar cycle, every night she had dreamed of the great shining disc of the moon, of a night sky drenched in stars. Of owls calling in the trees as she raced past them, frogs lowing, foxes yipping, wind in her fur, a thousand scents in her nose. Of a flock of bats circling through the sky,  _ bats _ , for some reason, tiny black silhouettes against the amber glow of the great harvest moon; she had lifted her voice, in her dreams, and called to them.

Her father had been unable to explain the bats (though she was  _ sure _ there had been a glint of recognition in his eye when she’d told him). But the rest was natural, normal, he’d said. And the unmistakable sign. 

She thought she was prepared, when the full autumn moon finally rose above the shadowy treeline. 

But she didn’t even get a chance to look at her father at first because when the transformation started, it  _ hurt _ , hurt worse than when she’d broken her arm falling off her bike or sprained her ankle playing soccer, just  _ hurt _ . She fell down to the grass, gasping, trying not to cry, as her small body shook to accommodate her bones cracking and reforming, her internal organs shifting and growing as her clothes melted into thick russet, reddish fur; she opened her mouth to shout for her dad and suddenly it was full of too-long teeth, that pierced and cut into her tongue. 

She cried out, and, before Jim could see or stop her, she half-ran, half-stumbled into the trees, falling over several times as she tried,  _ tried _ to adjust to the tangle of her limbs. Slipping on the dead leaves, tumbling through bushes and thickets, tripping over her own paws to fall through branches and down a small hill until she landed in a brackish, muddy puddle choked with dead plants. 

She whimpered, struggling to move her limbs. Freakish, monstrous; her claws scrabbled in the mud.

Barbara lifted her head, and her eyesight was all  _ wrong _ . She could see a spider crawling on a leaf quite some feet away, but colors were muted, and she could barely see anything to the side of her head. When she tried to call out, it came out as a yip. The sensation of her own fur was ruined by the mud and water that now clung to it. 

She yipped again, wishing for her own strong voice, and all the squirrels in the trees fled upwards in terror; she sent a rabbit fleeing from its nearby burrow. All the scents now inundating her senses were so horrifically overwhelming that she wanted to bury her nose in the mud, while at the same time all her instincts screamed at her to find shelter, to eat, to run from this exposed spot. 

Her father had called her strong before, and now, she struggled to pull herself free from the puddle. She got to her feet, balancing gingerly on them, shaking herself as best she could to remove the dirty water, and moved through the trees, trying to smell out whatever  _ might _ be her father in amongst thousands of other smells. 

A fox barked in alarm nearby, and it sounded like a gunshot to her newly sensitive ears. 

Barbara leaned against a pine tree, collapsing into herself, whimpering faintly. The sort of thing that bigger kids at school would try and mock her for. 

Then, above her, she heard a squeak. 

She raised her head again. 

It took a second to adjust for her new vision, but dangling from a low branch, shrouded by shadowy pine needles, was a huge black bat. Big as an owl, leathery wings draped around itself like the folds of a heavy black cape, pointed ears twitching faintly. Unlike every other animal in the forest that now sensed her, it did not cry out or flee, but remained in place, looking down at her. 

As it did, it regarded Barbara with a strange intelligence; even overwhelmed as she was, instincts on high alert, she wondered if bats were  _ supposed _ to have eyes like that. Pale ice-blue, narrowed in clever calculation. Blue as a person’s. 

The great black bat opened his mouth to chitter throatily, not a frightened noise, but an inquiring one, and she saw that his white front teeth were as sharp as her own. Seeing this, the raccoon in the tree across clambered away in fright. But Barbara was undaunted, and a bubble of mutual curiosity, excitement even, grew in her chest. She got back up, bracing her paws on the pine trunk, barking a welcome to him. In turn, he inclined his head towards her, calling down, despite his bulk, with a kind of gentleness. Understanding, even. 

She watched as he opened his broad wings, and lifted off into the night air. When he called out, his voice echoing through the trees, a distant chorus of cries came back. She watched as the bats lifted off together, vanishing into the night, filling the black between the stars. 

Then a low, throaty howl split the air. 

Barbara whipped around in time to see the enormous gray shape ghosting through the maples and birches. Her own howl was little more than a yelp, but the shape changed direction immediately upon hearing it, and, before she knew it, a huge shadow covered her. 

Her father loomed over every other creature in those woods. He was the size of a horse in this form, with big shoulders shifting under thick, silvered fur; his mouth open to show teeth as long and sharp as knives. But he wrapped one platter-sized paw around her to swiftly pull her close, enveloping her in warm, soft fur, and when he looked down at her, his eyes were the same shade of brown as they always had been. His touch was gentle as he nuzzled the side of her face, and as he did, she finally let herself snuggle into him, safe. Nerves turning to relief, then, as she smelled the night air, looked up at the light of the moon, turning to something else entirely, something that made her heart begin to race again. 

At the same time, she realized that, in the noises her father made, in the way he moved, she could find meaning. 

_ Are you alright? _

She let him check her over, and she looked up at him, letting him see that was alright and that her fear was gone. 

Anticipation was all that remained. 

Jim made a soft noise of contentment, then finally pulled away, getting back to his feet. As she moved to join him, Barbara felt embarrassedly aware that she only came to part-way up his leg; she stretched herself up to be taller, stronger, like how she finally felt. He let out an amused whuff, then nuzzled her one last time.

_ Are you ready? _

She lifted her head and looked back at the moon. This was only the first time, and she knew that, from this point forward, as her fears slowly alleviated, that no matter who else couldn't accept her, she would never be alone. And then, someday, she would not be afraid of the forest,  _ or  _ herself, at all; she would be big and strong, she would be in control, and those that she encountered would fear her instead. 

Young as she was, she no longer trembled, but shook her head back proudly at the thought. She was looking forward to it. 

_ I’m ready. _

Father and daughter both took off at a run; autumn moonshine slanted through the trees, bathing them both in cold, bright silver light. The crisp wind rushed through her fur as they sped through the forest, and, right then, while the bats circled far beyond them, past the stars, she finally understood what it felt like to fly.


End file.
